Harvard Professor Tells Us that We’ve Evolved to “Need Coercion”

For a number of years I have written on the ethical implications of evolution. If evolution is true, the atheistic variety, there are no moral absolutes. This is not to say that atheistic evolutionists are not moral. Many of them are just as moral as non-atheists. While they may be moral and espouse a moral worldview, they cannot account for the validity of their moral choices or even what constitutes morality considering that “for hundreds of millions of years, multicelled animals have been emerging, competing, fighting, killing, parasitizing, torturing, suffering, and going extinct.”1

Were these actions by multicelled animals morally wrong in their struggle for survival? If they weren’t then, then why are they morally wrong now? It’s a simple question that deserves an answer that atheistic evolutionists cannot give without a great deal of borrowing from a theistic worldview.

Now we learn from Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology Daniel E. Lieberman, in an opinion piece published in the New York Times, that “We have evolved to need coercion.” Dr. Lieberman wrote came to this conclusion in support of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on sugary drinks.

As a product of mindless, directionless, amoral, blind pitiless indifferent DNA, as Richard Dawkins describes the process of evolution, Dr. Lieberman doesn’t have the slightest idea what we have evolved to need. And given the unknowable route evolution will take us in the future, no one can say that today’s rise of cannibalism in America is not a direction that are genes are taking us. Not that the tapping on a keyboard by Richard Dawkins, himself a product of “blind pitiless indifference,” means anything, there is no way within the evolution orbit to condemn today’s cannibals:

“In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”2

There is no way to know if Adolf Hitler was a head of his time, one of evolution’s “hopeful monsters” that the not-so-evolved human race at that did not appreciate, or whether he was evil incarnate. An evolutionist cannot say.

Once the moral claim of government coercion is accepted bused on what is said to be a scientific fact, then who’s to say where it should and can stop. With Mayor Bloomberg it began with trans fats and salt and has “evolved” to sugary drinks and movie pop corn. What’s frightening about all of this is that more than 40 percent of New Yorkers approve of the coercion.

Because evolution is said to be a scientific fact like gravity is a scientific fact, we are now at the mercy of anyone who can argue for coercion in the name of science. Dennis Prager understands the political “evolution” of liberalism:

Whereas until now, the democratic left has attempted to persuade humanity that left-wing policies are inherently progressive, this Harvard professor has gone a huge step further. Left-wing policies are scientifically based. This is exactly how the Soviet Communists defended their totalitarian system. Everything they advocated was naoochni, “scientific.”

Scientism is the god of modern man. It’s a religion, and a very bad one, that is being forced on all of us in the name of an enlightened worldview.

William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2009), 49. [↩]

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133. [↩]

Gary DeMar

Gary DeMar was raised in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University (1973) and Reformed Theological Seminary (1979). He has served as researcher and writer at the Christian Worldview ministry American Vision since 1980 and President since 1984. Today he serves as Senior Fellow at American Vision where he lectures, researches, and writes on various worldview issues. Gary is the author of 30 books on a variety of topics – from "America’s Christian History" and "God and Government" to "Thinking Straight in a Crooked World" to "Last Days Madness." Gary has been interviewed by Time magazine, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the BBC, and Sean Hannity. He has done numerous radio and television interviews, including the “Bible Answer Man,” hosted by Hank Hanegraaff and “Today’s Issues” with Tim Wildmon and Marvin Sanders. Newspaper interviews with Gary have appeared in the Washington Times, Toledo (Ohio) Blade, the Sacramento Bee, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marietta Daily Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Chicago Tribune.

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